The Press-Dispatch
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C-4 Wednesday, April 21, 2021 The Press-Dispatch OPINION Submit Letters to the Editor: Letters must be signed and received by noon on Mondays. Email: editor@pressdispatch.net or bring in a hard copy: 820 E. Poplar Street, Petersburg Americans deeply value the sacri- fices that U.S. service members and their families make. They include overseas deployments, nationwide moves, mental health strain, or even the death of a spouse or parent. While many military families make major sacrifices, they draw the line when it comes to their chil- dren's education. According to a Military Times sur- vey, more than one-third of active-du- ty military personnel reported that dissatisfaction with their children's education options was a prime factor in their decision on whether or not to remain in the military. At the same time, 40 percent of respondents indicated that they de- clined or would decline promotions that would require their children to leave their current high-performing school. Military families' hesitancy to disrupt their children's education should come as no surprise since, depending on the branch, military personnel are already required to re- locate every two to three years on av- erage. That means that by the time many military-connect- ed children grad- uate high school, they will have at- tended six different schools on average. Frequent moves can have negative effects on children's learning. In fact, the MacArthur Foundation estimat- ed that moving can cause students to lose nearly half a year of education- al attainment with each transition. At the same time, a recent me- ta-analysis found that the children of deployed military personnel strug- gled with mental health issues such as anxiety, depression, or aggression at higher rates than children whose parents were civilians. As such, the strains that accom- pany military life are significant for service members and their families, particularly when it comes to their children's education. But the federal government, which has a mandate to pro- vide for the national defense, has solutions at its disposal: Congress should afford the children of service members with education options that are flexible and meet their needs. Education savings ac- counts for military-connect- ed children would give families the flexibility necessary to accommo- date military service and the educa- tion needs of service members' chil- dren. These versatile accounts provide the education funds that would have been spent in an assigned public school directly to families instead, who can then use them to pay educa- tion expenses, such as private school Race for the Cure By Star Parker Points to Ponder By Rev. Ford Bond Like everybody who has access to Facebook, I was catching up with postings when I spotted this interest- ing article, apparently written by the famous Charlie Chaplin. If you know him, then you likely belong to a certain age group. I'm not sure if this article is accurate but I find it worthwhile sharing. It is load- ed with wit and wisdom. Charlie Chaplin apparently lived up to the ripe age of 88. He left us 4 statements: 1. Nothing is forever in this world, not even our problems. 2. I love walking in the rain be- cause no one can see my tears. 3. The most lost day in life is the day we don't laugh. 4. Six best doctors in the world: the sun, rest, exercise, diet, self-re- spect and friends. Stick for them at all stages of your life and enjoy a healthy life. If you see the moon, you will see the beauty of God. If you see the sun, you will see the power of God. If you see the mirror, you will see God's best creation. So believe it. We are all tourists, God is our travel agent Who has identified our routes, bookings and destina- tions. Trust Him and enjoy life. Life is just a journey! Therefore, live to- day. Tomorrow may not be. ••• I looked for some more good post- ings. I discovered that after all, there are some good things if you look for them in the right places. Here are some: Never blame anyone in your life. Good people give you happiness. Bad people give you experience. Worse people give you a lesson. Best people give you memories. ••• A seed grows without a sound, but a tree falls with a huge noise. Destruction has noise, but creation is quiet. This is the pow- er of silence. Grow Silently. ••• Having someone to love is FAMI- My Point of View By H. K. Fenol, Jr., M.D. Facebook postings Continued on page 5 Continued on page 5 Continued on page 5 Continued on page 5 Continued on page 5 Give Me a Break By John Stossel Crowder calls out censorship Eye on the Economy By Stephen Moore Biden's plan declares war on US energy Make Me a Sanctuary Lent has prepared the faithful to become a sanctuary for the Promise of the Father [The giving of the Holy Spirit]. What do you envision when you hear the word sanctuary? A sanctuary is a sacred place; the Proverb writer states, "The name of the Lord is a strong tower; the righ- teous run to it and are safe. Our desire as a Christian should be to ask the Lord to make each of us a sanctuary! God told the Hebrews as they were heading to the Promised Land that they were to make a sanctuary for Him, and He would dwell among them. The Law of Moses was instituted to teach the Children of Israel, who had been in slavery and bondage to sin, what God required of them if they were to be His people. God had made Abraham a promise, and now it was going to be fulfilled. But first they had to know some- thing about their God! The focus of religious life was The Tabernacle of the Wilderness and would remain the focal point of wor- ship and encountering God for ma- ny generations. The purpose of the tabernacle was to allow God to dwell among His peo- ple in order to meet their needs. Within the Law of Moses and the Tabernacle, we see God's compas- sion for his people. They knew so lit- tle about Him, for they had no written manuscripts to guide them. God had longed to identify Himself with His people and to dwell among them. He wanted to dwell in fellow- ship with those who place their faith in him. It is without controversy that it has always been God who sought out a people who loved Him. At the time of the Exodus, never had any person or group been sought out by God to be His people, to be- come a sanctuary for Him. Howev- er, God sought them out! However, the sinfulness of all peo- ple, not just the Hebrews, was a bar- rier between God and those who sought Him. Remember, a sanctu- ary is to be holy and clean; therefore, God could not dwell in their sinful midst in just any way. So He prescribed a way that this could be done, which was the Tab- ernacle in the Wilderness [or Sanc- tuary]. From this point forward, we can catalogue the increasing de- mands of God on His people to be- come a sanctuary for Him and to live out his promises. This sanctuary was the focal point of worship and meeting with God as a group; however, it would be super- seded by the Temple in Jerusalem. Ezekiel wrote of God's desire to go beyond rituals and law, and com- municate one to one as He did with Adam: "Then I will give them one heart, and I will put a new spirit with- in them, and take the stony heart out of their flesh, and give them a heart of flesh, that they may walk in My statutes and keep My judgments and do them; and they shall be My peo- ple, and I will be their God." Sadly, the Children of Israel con- sidered the temple the permanent Sanctuary for God, and had no con- cept that He desired to live within them. Their rallying cry was "Let's Go to the Sanctuary" to meet God, but God wanted them to be the Sanc- tuary where He would reside! John the Baptist chided his people "I indeed baptize you with water un- to repentance, but He who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spir- it and fire." John is telling his people that God was going to refine them as a metal worker refines gold and silver; He is going to remove the impurities so He can dwell there! They were going to become a Sanctuary. Can you embrace the essence "Lord Prepare Me to Be a Sanctu- ary? Pentecost is coming! Think about it! The most viewed conservative commentator on YouTube is Steven Crowder with his channel, Louder with Crowder. His fans love his politically incor- rect jokes. He also sets up a table at college campuses, invites people to debate, and airs the debate unedited. One such video, titled, "There Are Two Genders: Change My Mind," has been viewed 40 million times. Stu- dents don't change Crowder's mind, but he has a fair conversation. Crowder won't change my mind, either — (I believe gender can be on a spectrum) but in my new vid- eo, Crowder says he was influenced by me. Louder With Crowder, he says, is "a cross between early David Letter- man, maybe Howard Stern T V and John Stossel." I interviewed Crowder last week because YouTube abruptly deleted some of his videos, blocked him from uploading new vid- eos for a week and permanently de- monetized his chan- nel. "It means I can make $ 0 on You- Tube," he explains. YouTube even deleted his good reporting that showed Nevada elec- tion rolls include people with fake addresses. Why? YouTube says its "presidential election integrity pol- icy" bans "false claims that wide- spread fraud, errors, or glitches changed the outcome of any past U.S. presidential election." But Crowder made no such claims, and what he said was true! YouTube could have checked. Crowder lists his sources on his website. Good for him. I'm also glad that he de- fends freedom. "Individuals, if given the freedom and op- portunity to do so... do things relatively well," he says. But Crowder does some things that make me cringe. In one video, he dresses as a ste- reotypical Chinese man and dunks a baby doll into a glass of water while Am I the only one who finds it head-scratching that President Joe Biden, who wants to spend $2 trillion of taxpayer money on "infrastruc- ture," is the same president whose first act in the White House was to kill a multibillion-dollar oil and gas pipeline that would create some 15,000 jobs? The Keystone pipeline that he canceled was vital to our en- ergy infrastructure and wasn't going to cost taxpayers a penny. The Biden infrastructure plan is a head fake. The agenda here isn't about creating "millions of new jobs." It's a declaration of war against one of the largest sources of new jobs in the United States: our domestic en- ergy producers. Some 80 percent of our energy to- day comes from fossil fuels, and well more than half of it comes from oil and natural gas. I wonder if Joe Biden — or any- one on his ener- gy team — knows that. Do they know that in the last week of 2020, during President Donald Trump's final weeks in office, the United States imported ze- ro barrels of oil from Saudi Arabia for the first time in 35 years? America became the world's larg- est energy exporter under Trump, and it wasn't because of big conglom- erates such as Exxon Mobil Corp. or BP, who do a lot of their drilling out- side of the U.S. It was "wildcatters," with their hydraulic fractur- ing operations entirely situ- ated within the United States, that nearly doubled domestic drilling. Such smaller enter- prises don't have complex "global footprints." As a White House econom- ics adviser, I used to discuss energy policy with Trump. I would tell him that we should strive to make America "ener- gy-independent." But he would chas- tise me and insist, "I want to make America energy-dominant." This saved the country more than $200 billion a year — money that Heritage Viewpoint By Jude Schwalbach Military families deserve flexible education options Gov. Hutchinson's distortion of President Reagan Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas raised ire from conser- vatives for vetoing legislation passed by the Arkansas state legislature that would have banned "gender-affirm- ing" medical treatment for transgen- der minors. This includes treatment such as hormone therapy, puberty blockers and surgery associated with gender identity. The legislature then overrode Hutchinson's veto, making Arkansas the nation's first state to ban these procedures. Of particular interest is Hutchin- son's rationalization of his veto; he defined it as a conservative stance and used former President Reagan to justify his thinking. Hutchinson argued during a T V interview that allowing government to prohibit these procedures pushes up against conservative principles of limiting the role of government. "I go back to Ronald Reagan, to principles of our party, which be- lieves in a limited role of govern- ment," he said. "Are we as a party abandoning a limited role of govern- ment and saying we're going to in- voke the government decision-mak- ing over and above physicians, over and above health care, over and above parents — and saying, 'You can't do that. You cannot engage in it'? " Reagan was a conservative pres- ident who did indeed want to lim- it government's control of our pri- vate lives. But the word is "limit," not "erase." Let's consider Reagan's words in one of his most famous speeches, known as the "evil empire" speech, which he delivered to the Nation- al Association of Evangelicals on March 8, 1983. In that speech, Reagan called the then-Soviet Union "an evil empire" and cast the struggle between the U.S. and the USSR as a struggle of good against evil. He saw commu- nism as evil because of its explicit godlessness. However, Reagan also used that speech to make a broader statement regarding the general question of good and evil and his own country. "I want you to know," he said, "that this administration is motivated by a political philosophy that sees the greatness of America in ... the insti- tutions that foster and nourish val- ues like concern for others and re- spect for the rule of law under God." "(T)his puts us in opposition to, or at least out of step with, a prevailing attitude of many who have turned to a modern-day secularism, discard- ing the tried and time-tested values upon which our very civilization is based," he said. And here is the crux: "Sometimes their voices are louder than ours, but they are not yet a majority." That was 1983. A culture in which the objective re- ality of male/female, man and wom- an, is denied — despite the clarity of this reality both in the words of the Bible and the chemical reality of the genetic code — is a godless culture that Reagan would likely call evil to- day, just as he called the Soviet Union evil then. "Freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and the rule of law under God acknowledged," Reagan said in his speech. He quoted William Penn, saying, "If we will not be governed by God, we must be governed by tyrants." Conservatism should be under- stood literally. To "conserve" is to save and preserve the core tradition- al values that enable our freedom. It is hard to believe that, as Gov. Hutchinson suggests, Reagan's idea of limited government means stand- ing aside as a tyrannical secularism sweeps through our nation and wip- ing out any remaining remnant of those traditional biblical truths. All the more so, it is hard to believe that Reagan would see government sitting by passively and uninvolved as those values are imposed on mi- nors, who are not even old enough to vote. MILITARY Court Down